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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25521802">Examination of The Worst</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemechanicalalligator/pseuds/onemechanicalalligator'>onemechanicalalligator</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:08:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,272</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25521802</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemechanicalalligator/pseuds/onemechanicalalligator</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Character study of Britta Perry.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Examination of The Worst</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Britta is used to being called The Worst, and she doesn’t really let it phase her, because she’s pretty confident her friends don’t really mean it. It’s more a term of endearment, or an inside joke. She doesn’t take it personally, and she doesn’t let it sit in her heart and fester there, twisting and fermenting until it finds a shred of fear or insecurity to latch onto and feed from, until it grows and spreads like a disease throughout her body.</p><p>No, she definitely doesn’t do that.</p><p>Except it turns out that’s a thing she doesn’t have control over; a virus like that has a life of its own. It takes over and spreads and eats and infects and she doesn’t even notice it until she’s on her sixth day in a row drunk at work, and everything feels heavy and difficult, and all she wants is to therapize her friends so she can stay out of her own head for a few minutes.</p><p>There’s darkness in Britta, and she tries to hide that, tries to mask it with activism and promiscuity and weed, tries to run away from it the way she runs away from a lot of things, and she’s been running almost her whole life, and it’s always something, her parents, college, responsibility. A guy in a dinosaur costume who does Bad Things, only no one believes her when she tells them, because she’s just A Child, and that's the first time she learns to stop telling and start running.</p><p>It turns out her friends have been talking to her parents, and they <em> like </em> her parents, and they take <em> money </em> from her parents, and Britta is so upset by this that she can’t articulate to them what a betrayal this is, why it hurts so much. She can’t explain the reasons she left, can’t make them understand that these people they know aren’t the parents she knew. She guesses she can understand why they’re treating her like she’s the crazy one, because maybe she’s acting crazy, or maybe she’s just The Worst.</p><p>Either way, she feels alone, and sad, and misunderstood.</p><p>Britta is a psych major. She knows about things like <em> gaslighting </em> and <em> complex trauma. </em> She knows maybe that’s what’s happening here, except she can’t quite believe it, can’t convince herself that this <em> counts. </em> She understands these concepts in an abstract sense, and even in terms of other people, her friends, her classmates. But she can’t manage to apply them to herself, can’t believe she deserves that sort of validation.</p><p>She doesn’t always express herself well, and she knows this, but she doesn’t know how to fix it. There are a lot of things she doesn’t know how to do: how to be a good activist, how to be political, how to take care of herself, how to pull pranks. She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t understand why she doesn’t know when it seems to come so naturally to some people, and sometimes she wishes her friends wouldn’t give her such a hard time about it.</p><p>Britta has a close group of friends, and she still feels lost sometimes. She has so many feelings, and she doesn’t know how to express them. She thinks she’s not very good at being A Girl, not the way Annie and Shirley are, and they make that pretty clear. She tries to learn, like with Shirley and the bathroom thing, but it feels so awkward and wrong, like she’s trying to play a part but she doesn’t know the lines or the stage directions. Girls dislike her a lot, and she thinks she understands why. It’s because she doesn’t play by the rules. It’s because she doesn’t <em> know </em> the rules.</p><p>She wants to be successful. She wants to have a career, and a house, and all those things she didn’t want when she ran away from home the first time. She wants stability. She wants to be an adult, and she <em> is </em>an adult, but she’s already in her early thirties and she feels like she’s wasting time, like she’s not where she should be, like she got stuck somewhere, held back. She feels younger than other people her age, and not in a good way. People her age have spouses, kids, retirement accounts. Britta gets drunk at work more often than not and sleeps on a couch in an apartment with two roommates.</p><p>And she doesn’t know if she really wants a spouse or kids, but it kind of feels like time is running out, like that choice is going to be made for her pretty soon, and that scares her, because she likes freedom, she doesn’t like being told what she can and can’t do. She doesn’t like feeling like she’s not in control of her destiny, and that’s why religion is so confusing to her, the idea that people don’t want to be in control of what happens to them, they want to leave that up to someone they can’t even see.</p><p>She’s sad, and worried, and she doesn’t know who to go to, so she doesn’t go to anyone, and she’s surprised when the group shows up at the Vatican, or at least the core part of the group, Jeff and Annie and Abed, and she’s more surprised to find she’s glad to see them. She’s already started drinking tonight, and she pretends she hasn’t but they can tell pretty quickly, and they give her a hard time about it. Usually she laughs along with them and makes jokes at her own expense, but this time something in her breaks, and she starts to cry instead.</p><p>Her friends spring to action. Jeff goes to find another bartender to cover for her, and Annie pulls Britta down to a chair and wraps her arms around her, and Abed asks her if she’s okay. She’s about to say yes, she’s fine, when she notices Abed hesitate for just a second, and then he takes her hand and holds it in his own, and that flips some kind of switch in her and she shakes her head instead, leans it into Annie’s chest.</p><p>Jeff is back by then, and he asks Britta if something happened, if there’s something she wants to talk about, and she shakes her head again, and Annie pats her back. It’s nice, it’s comforting, and Britta is so very tired. It’s nice to feel like there’s someone holding her up, even if just for a little while. She feels something and looks to see that Jeff has put his hand on her head, is rubbing his thumb on her temple, and she closes her eyes, lets herself be caught in this net of her friends and their touch and their warmth and their love.</p><p>They let her stay like this as long as she needs to, none of them speak or move except when Abed squeezes her hand or Annie rubs her back or Jeff smoothes her hair, little sprinkles of affection to remind her that they’re still there, and that she’s still there, too.</p><p>When she finally opens her eyes and sits up, her friends don’t move, but they do smile at her, even Abed, and it’s a real smile. They look at her encouragingly, waiting for her to say something, but she can’t speak. Her words are caught in her throat, and she usually dislodges them with another drink, but she doesn’t want to tonight. So instead, she smiles back.</p><p>“Britta,” Jeff says. “You’re The Best.”</p><p>“The Very Best,” Annie agrees.</p><p>“The Best of the Best,” Abed adds.</p><p>It’s exactly what she needs to hear.</p>
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